The people who don’t want you to run your own servers are the ones who want to run the servers.
People will happily run their own servers if it’s so simple to do that they don’t even know they’re doing it.
You want people to run their own servers? Design and build servers for individuals, not communities and let communities arise from the interconnections between those servers.
Why?
Because that’s the only way we can compete on ease of use with centralised systems. Not by mimicking their complexity but by side-stepping it. There is orders of magnitude difference in complexity between a system designed to serve just one and one designed to serve one, two, or a hundred thousand.
@aral What I worry about is this: There are many things users want or "deserve" but ultimately, those who do the work get to shape their work. If developers are personally comfortable with editing config files and command-line tools, that's what we end up getting.
